YouSaid · the spoken record

Lars Doucet

lines on the record: 118
first: 2023-01-09
most recent: 2023-01-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But there's this phenomenon called land banking and waiting for the land to ripen, right? Sure, I could build it now, but I might have a lot of land parcels I've got, and I don't need to build it now because I think the prices might go up later, and it would be better to build on it later than it is now. And it's not costing me anything to keep it vacant now. If I build now, I'm going to have to pay a little bit more property taxes. And I know in three years that the price is going to be even better. So maybe I'll wait to incur those construction costs then. And right now I'm going to focus more on building over here. And like I've got a lot of things to do, you know, so I'm just going to squat on it here. It's the same way like I have, I'm squatting like, you know, to my shame, like about 30 domain names, you know, most of them bought before I kind of got onto Georgism. And it's like, yeah, I'll pay 15 bucks a year to just hold it. Why not? You know what I mean? I might use that someday.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, arguably, empirically, we just don't see that. You know, we see rising land prices as long as productivity and population increases. Those productivity and population gains get soaked into the price of the land. It's because of this phenomenon called Ricardo's law of rent. And it's been pretty empirically demonstrated that it has to do with the negotiation power. But why some people do, of course, build and invest. You know, there's a lot of local laws that restrict people's ability to build. But another reason is just like it also has to do with the existing part of it. Part of the effect is partially the existing property tax regime actively incentivizes empty lots because you have a higher tax burden if you build, right? So what actually happens is a phenomenon that's similar to oil wells, right? It's not just because of property taxes. Those do encourage you to keep it empty.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right, right. So there's a lot of reasons. And one of them has to do with an image in the book that this guy put together for me. I'll show it to you later. But what it does is that it shows the rate of return, what a land speculator is actually optimizing for is their rate of return, right? And so if land appreciates by 10% a year, You know, you're actually incentivized to invest in vacant land or a teardown property because the building of a teardown property is like worth negative value, so the land's cheaper because there's garbage on it, you know, than you are to necessarily invest in a property and you're basically your marginal dollar is better spent on more land than it is on building up.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, and so a severance tax is basically Nestle should be charged a severance tax for the water they're using, for instance, because all they're doing is enclosing a pre-existing natural resource that used to belong to the people that they've essentially enclosed and now they're just putting it in bottles and selling it to people. You know, they should be able to realize the value of the value add they give to that water, but not to just taking that resource away.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Severance tax is a tax on the extraction of natural resources, is what Norway does with their oil industry that has been massively successful, and a key reason that Norway has avoided the resource curse. Basically, it's Georgus Purist will say it's essentially a land value tax, but of a different kind, a land value tax like you can't normally like extract just like land on this in this house you're living on you're like you're not using up this land but non-renewable resources you can use up”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything, you know. So if we were taxing him during his lifetime based off of what he was doing of being a failure, like if Van Gogh was taxed of his like wasting his life as an artist as he thought he was, which ultimately led to his suicide, you know, a lot of these things are not necessarily realized at the time. And so I think that's, and it would need a much bigger kind of bureaucracy to like figure that all out. So I think you should go with a more modest. I mean, I think after land value tax, you should do things like severance tax on natural resources and other taxes on other monopolies and rents. And so I think the next move after land value tax is not immediately to capital and income taxes and sales taxes, but to other taxes on other rent-seeking and other land-like assets that aren't literally physically land. And then only after you've done all of those, if you still absolutely...”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think probably not. I think you would probably want to go with some other just simpler text for the sake of it, because there's too many degrees of freedom in there. And it's like, we can talk about why I will defend the Georgist case for property tax assessments for land value tax. But I think it gets different when you start judging what is the most valuable use of your time. Because that's a much more subjective question. Like you're a, like, okay, are you providing more value to society as being a podcaster or being a CS, a computer science person or creating a startup? It's like that may not be evident for some time. You know what I mean? Like, I can't think of an example, but like think of people who are never successful during their lifetimes. Like the guy who invented, what was it, FM radio, right? He threw himself out a window because he never got it really adopted during his lifetime, but it went on to change.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm less interested in that and my moral principles are more about let's start with just taxing the things nobody has made and that people are gatekeeping access to. Let's tax essentially monopolies and rent seeking and then If we still need to raise more taxes, we can talk about that later. But let's start with just taxing the worst things in society and then stop taxing things we actually want more of because we have this mentality right now where everything's a trade-off and we have to accept the downsides of income taxes, of sales taxes, of capital taxes because we just need the revenue and it has to come from somewhere. And my argument is it's like it can come from a much better somewhere. So let's start with that. Yeah, yeah.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That a shipping company could get off the ground. You know, those are valuable contributive things, but nobody made the earth. The earth pre-exists all of us, and so someone who provides land actually does the opposite of providing land. They unprovide land, and then they charge you for opening the gate. And so the argument for charging people on the unimproved value of land is that we want to tax unproductive rent-seeking. We want to tax non-produced assets because we think we want to encourage people to produce assets. We want to encourage people to produce labor, to produce capital. We want more of those things. And there's that aphorism that if you want less of something, you should tax it. So, I mean, maybe there is a case for some kind of galaxy brain take of, you know, taxing unrealized opportunity costs or whatever.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so really, before you can even answer that question, you got to go back to ground moral principles you're operating on. Like, is your moral operating principle like we just want to increase efficiency? So we're going to tax everyone in a way to basically account for the wasted opportunity cost, which brings up a lot of other questions of like, well, who decides what that is. But I think the Georgist argument is a little different. We're not necessarily like it is efficient, the tax we propose, but it actually stems kind of from a more from a different place, a more kind of fundamental aspect of justice, you know. And from our perspective, if you work and you produce value, your work produced that value, right? And if you save money and accumulate capital in order to put that capital to work to receive a return, you've also provided something valuable to society, you know. You save money so a factory could exist, right? You saved money so that”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just kind of blew my mind that we could reproduce the problems of the real world so articulately in the virtual world without anyone trying to do it. It just happened. And that is kind of the actual connection between my background in game design and kind of getting George pilled, as the internet kids call it these days.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good 25 years later, and that housing crisis remains unsolved. And you have this entire black market for housing, you know, and then I noticed that that trend was repeated in other online games, like Final Fantasy XIV and then recently in 2022 with all this huge wave of crypto games like Axie Infinity and Decentraland and the Sandbox and then Yuga Labs' Board Ape Yacht Club, the other side, had all these big land sales. And at the time, I was working as an analyst for a video game consulting firm called Novik. And I told my employers it's like, we're going to see all the same problems happen. We're going to see virtual land speculation. They're going to hit, they're going to reproduce the conditions of housing crises in the real world. And it's going to be a disaster. And I called it, and it turns out I was right. And we've now seen that whole cycle kind of work itself out.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting, but then I started noticing this weird phenomenon in online multiplayer games going back thirty years repeatedly, of virtual housing crises, which is the most bizarre concept in the world to me like basically a housing crisis in the metaverse and predecessors to the metaverse. As early as Ultima Online when I was 19, you know, this online game that you could play. You could build houses in the game and put them down somewhere. And so what I found was that houses were actually fairly cheap. You could work long enough in the game to be afforded to like buy blueprints for a house, which will put it somewhere. But there was no land to put it on. And I at the time, I thought, oh, well, I guess the server filled up. You know, I didn't really think much about it. I was like, this stinks. I didn't join the game early enough. You know, I'm kind of screwed out of housing. And then I kind of forgot about it. And then like 20 years later, I checked back in. And that housing crisis is still ongoing in that game. That game is still running, you know.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. I wouldn't say that's what clued me into it in the first place, but I have become very interested in all forms of rent seeking, right? In this general category of things we call landlike assets that come to first mover advantages in these large platform economies. I've started to think a lot about it, basically. But the essence of land speculation is you have this entire class of people who are able to basically gatekeep access to a scarce resource that everybody needs, which is land, right? That you can't opt out of needing. And because of that, everyone basically has to pay them rent. And those people don't necessarily do anything. You know, they just got there first until everyone else. It's like, well, if you want to participate in the world, you need to pay me. And so we're actually, we're the actual connection with game development, actually including into Georgiaism, is I'd heard about Georgism before. I'd read about it. I thought it was.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our time, it's computers and everything else. We have all this good stuff. We can make more than we've ever made before. There's enough wealth for everybody, and yet we still have inequality. Where does it come from? And George answers that question in his book, and I expand on it in mine.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Struggle of human history. It goes beyond human history. Animals have been fighting over land forever. That's what they're fighting over in Ukraine and Russia right now, right? And basically the fundamental insight of Georgism is that over the last century, we've had this huge conflict, all the oxygen's been sucked up by capitalism and socialism duking it out. We have this assumption that you either have to be pro-worker or pro-business, that you can't be both. And Georgism is, genuinely pro-worker and pro-business. But what it's against is land speculation. And if we can find a way to share the earth, then we can solve the paradox that is the title of George's book Progress and Poverty. Why does poverty advance even when progress advances? Why do we have all this industrialized technology and new methods and in Georgia's time it was industrial technology?”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so the book is based off of the philosophy of a 19th century American economist by the name of Henry George from once we get Georgism. And basically George's thesis is kind of the title of my book. That land is a big deal. Georgism is often reduced to its main policy prescription that we should have a land value tax, which is a tax on the unimproved value of land, but not a tax on any buildings or infrastructure on top of the land, anything humans add. But the basic insight of it is that it's kind of reflected in the aphorisms you hear from real estate agents when they say things like the three laws of real estate or location location location and by land it's the one thing they're not making anymore of it's basically this insight that land has this hidden role in the economy that is really underrated but if you look at history through the right lens control over land is the oldest”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the last century, we've had this huge conflict. All the oxygen's been sucked up by capitalism and socialism duking it out. We have this assumption that you either have to be pro-worker or pro-business, that you can't be both. I have noticed a lot of crypto people get into Georgism, not the least of which is Vitalik Buter, and you endorse my book. If you earn $100,000 in San Francisco as a family of poor, you are below the poverty line. Let's start with just taxing the things nobody has made and that people are gatekeeping access to. Let's tax essentially monopolies and rent-seeking. The income tax needs to do this full anal probe on everyone in the country, and then audits the poor at a higher rate than the rich, and it's just this horrible burden we have.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source